[MOBY-dev] Re: [MOBY] join operations

[Phillip Lord]

>>>>> "Mark" == Mark Wilkinson <markw at illuminae.com> writes:

  Mark> Hi Ken,

  Mark> I will only quote the part that I object to:

  Mark> On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 00:42, Ken Steube wrote:


  >> Then, forward it to one of the services to fill in X values.
  >> That services fills in its part and sends to the second service.

  Mark> Ugly ugly ugly :-)

  Mark> I may be alone here, but I absolutely do NOT want this kind of
  Mark> responsibility to fall on the service provider.  IMO this is a
  Mark> 100% client-side problem.  It is "MOBYesque" to make service
  Mark> provision as mindlessly simple as possible (that is actually
  Mark> one of the founding tenets of the MOBY project) - as soon as
  Mark> the service provider becomes responsible for knowing how and
  Mark> where to forward your request it gets unnecessarily
  Mark> complicated (unless it is something as mindless as a 302
  Mark> Document Moved redirection).


There is no reason that this should not be implemented by a base
class. There is no intrinsic reason, for example, why a service
provider should not forward results onto another service, rather than
return it directly to the client. 

This need not put any requirement on the service providers, if they
use a standard API for publishing a service. The base class can handle
it all. 

  >> I don't believe this requires much change in our protoMOBY.  Just
  >> have a client search through the SOAP message for the part it
  >> understands and fill in that part.  Then forward it to some other
  >> service if necessary.

  Mark> I agree with you in one respect - that MOBY Services can
  Mark> (perhaps are obligated?) to hunt through a request for the
  Mark> pieces that they understand and can work with.  In fact, I
  Mark> consider this to be part of the central dogma of MOBY service
  Mark> provision.  What I am concerned about is putting the
  Mark> responsibility for fulfilling an arbitrary request on the
  Mark> shoulders of a possibly unrelated service provider.

  Mark> ... but as I said, I may be alone in my reservations here :-)

I understand your reservations, but think that they may not be so much
of a problem as you think.

Cheers

Phil